Slashdot Mirror

xDCDx writes "LucasFan Games have just released an impressive 256 color remake of Maniac Mansion. There is a sequel to Zak McKracken available too. Their website is scarce in details, but the games speak for themselves. It seems the perfect timing for this release, now that LucasArts is obsessed with killing the graphical adventure genre. (If only Ron Gilbert would buy Monkey Island rights and made Monkey Island 3a: The Real Story...)"

Thanks to GameSpy for its first impressions of the PC remake, Sid Meier's Pirates!, an updating of the seminal Civilization designer's late '80s game of the same name. Meier notes: "We've learned quite a bit about gameplay... we learned how to build on a classic game without destroying it", and the preview reveals: "The game world is a 'fully fleshed-out sandbox' where you'll have your own ship (or fleet of ships) and free reign to do as you please." However, Meier also mentions: "There's a little more of a stronger story pull", since apparently, this Q4 2004-due title has, like other piratical titles, "an über-villain, a pirate captain responsible for killing your parents, forcing you to leave the old world, and scattering your family all over the Caribbean."

Alex Moskalyuk writes "Ben Hammersley's Content Syndication with RSS is a step-by-step guide to implementing RSS. This standard is gaining popularity among the Web community, and some of your favorite sites might syndicate their content as RSS feeds. The new O'Reilly publication focuses on many aspects of this standard, and is of primary interest to developers, Web site designers, data architects and anyone interested in distributing their data around the Web." So if you have a steady stream of information for your customers, family, or fans, read on for the rest of Alex's review. Content Syndication With RSS author Ben Hammersley pages 222 publisher O'Reilly rating 8/10 reviewer Alex Moskalyuk ISBN 0596003838 summary Introduction and guide for RSS implementations

The first three chapters are primarily discussing the multiplicity of RSS standards. While with some other technologies it might seem a bit excessive, remember that RSS is a forked project with the forks at this moment bearing little resemblance to one another. The abbreviations even have different abbreviations - RSS means Really Simple Syndication if you are using RSS 0.91 or RSS 0.92, that was developed by Dave Winer. RSS means RDF Site Summary if the version you're using RSS 1.0. The development credits in this case go to RSS DEV team. To confuse you even more, the RSS 2.0 standard is deciphered as... correct, Really Simple Syndication again.

Hence chapter 4 discusses Winer's implementation (simplistic and user-friendly), while chapter 6 focuses on RSS 1.0 (RDF-compliant and data-architect-friendly), and chapter 8 talks about RSS 2.0 (improved RSS 0.9x). Chapter 4 is available online as a PDF file. Section 4.4 is recommended for those interested in promoting their RSS feeds as it provides pretty good reference to meta data.

Chapter 9 is perhaps of special interest to Web developers and administrators out there. It presents several code samples to properly parse RSS and present the result in readable HTML. The examples include (a) parsing with XML::Simple in Perl, (b) parsing with Perl regular expressions, (c) parsing with XML::Simple and sending the headlines to cell phones via WWW::SMS, (d) parsing via XSLT transformation. Python, PHP and ASP folks might feel left out due to the abundance of Perl examples, but if you got so far in the book, you can probably apply the regular expressions example or search for appropriate support for RSS format in your preferred language.

Going beyond the standard itself, RSS directories, aggregators and readers are discussed. Author makes a distinction between the last two by classifying Meerkat-like services into aggregators and desktop or Web applications designed to present the information to the user into readers. The chapter also provides information about Syndic8, its API, and describes the feed registration process. OReilly's Meerkat is also discussed in chapter, together with reference table for its API (you can make Meerkat generate HTML or RSS news headlines on certain topic or using certain keywords by providing a right query to its Web interface).

The book is quite a smooth read for a text describing the details of data specification. The chapters are informative and the book is not overloaded with useless information just to increase the page count. The tips are quite useful for someone, who is knew to the field and answers some questions not covered by standards (e.g., how often should you request an RSS feed, what to do if you're being screen-scraped, etc.)

I like the way the author divided the chapters into RSS 0.9x/2.0 and RSS 1.0 and kept two worlds apart. Most of the time you probably won't be interested in developing a feed to support both standards, but would like to focus just on one. The examples in Perl are perfect with me, although for someone new to Perl or programming in general those examples with abundant regular expressions might look a bit convoluted. Kudos to the author for not expanding on the topic, like many do, and providing an example of a script for RSS manipulation in every possible language out there.

What's missing? I wish more pages were dedicated to desktop RSS readers. FeedReader, HotSheet, Syndirella, Beaver and SharpReader are excellent end user applications currently gaining some popularity among those who'd prefer to browse the favorite headlines at a glance, instead of going to a dozen of sites every morning. To be fair, there's a huge list of readers in Appendix, and some applications mentioned above only came around in the last few months, which was probably after the book hit the press. Some sites also didn't make it into the book. I like DailyRotation and FreshNews that borrow from Meerkat's versatility and provide their own feed portal.

Overall, the book is a pretty good developer's guide to RSS standard. Accompanied with helpful illustrations and numerous tips it's an excellent resource for those unfamiliar with RSS and a helpful reference for those who have been doing Web syndication for a while.

You can purchase Content Syndication With RSS from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

hooded1 writes: "Although once considered a utopian ideal, it has now become a reality. Last night on January 20th Dan East released the alpha version of PocketQuake, the first successful port of Quake to any pda. ... Currently PocketQuake only runs on the iPaq." And Jacek Fedorynski points to this screenshot as well. Note that this only works for iPaqs running WinCE, not Linux.